Look "Scathing" up in your thesaurus.

Dearest Bloggerkins,

Today, I’m going to direct this post to certain writers. Lazy, uncreative hacks who pepper the pages of their novels with cocaine, so I have to keep reading them, even as I choke down their repetitive, poorly executed drivel.

Ooo, was that too harsh?

Stephen King wrote a really kick-ass book about writing, called unsurprisingly enough “On Writing.” The best book on writing, ever written! I mention this because I don’t intend for this blog post to be a rambling lecture on the proper way to write a novel. If you want that, see Mr. King, and while you’re there, get him to sign something for me.

The first reader to get a book signed by Stephen King and give it to me as a present, will be my number one fan!

Moving on. This is not a blog about good writing. It’s a post about bad writing, and more specifically, things that crappy writers do to piss me off.

First off, there are several words that when I come across them in a novel, I seriously want to 1. Stop reading, and 2. Lock that book in a treasure chest, time travel to the 1910s, buy a ticket for the Titanic, leave my luggage on board, watch the ship sink from a safe distance, travel back to the future, and then secretly sabotage any further diving expeditions to examine the wreckage.

For example, the word ‘padded,’ as in, ‘Theresa padded down with a machete in hand, hoping the crappy writer wouldn’t hear her coming.’

If you look it up in the dictionary, it means ‘to walk’ or ‘to walk as if with padded feet.’ Really? Just to walk? Walking isn’t good enough? You have to pad? At least use an interesting word, like ‘slink’ or ‘crept’ or ‘shuffle.’ All words that give more depth to the description, and don’t make you sound like a pretentious grad student, fresh off the GRE bandwagon.

Then there’s the overuse of pointing out people’s eye color, and giving said eyes worlds of emotion. Yes, they are the windows to our souls, but you know what? In real life, I don’t go around getting inappropriately close to others just so I can gaze deeply into their retinas, with the hopes of gauging some kind of emotional status. If I cared that much about how they’re doing, I’d check their facebook page.

Let’s get some real life examples in here to truly illustrate my point. If you’ve ever wandered through the young adult fiction section, you may have encountered a series starting with a book called “The Alchemyst” by Michael Scott. Ah, another pretentious trait! Adding y’s into the names of fantasy titles and characters to make them sound more ‘medieval’ or ‘magical.’ Sorry writers. Just makes you sound like an ydyot.

Here’s a few snippets from Scott’s latest book in the series, “The Necromancer.”
P. 76 “He watched what he recognized as fear flicker in the Alchemyst’s eyes.”

P. 77 “The slender, gray-eyed woman asked breathlessly,”

P. 78 “Enormous slit-pupiled golden eyes fixed on Scatach.”

Maybe I’m making something out of nothing, or being needlessly picky, but this is my blog, and I call that plain, old-fashioned lazy writing. This doesn’t mean you have to buy a thesaurus and find twenty million different ways to say the color blue. No. Just learn to describe a person other than by saying ‘the gray-eyed woman.’ This woman also happens to be a warrior, a vampire, a twin, an immortal and one sassy kung-fu master. All descriptions he could have used to keep my ire at bay.

Oh, and the fact that he used the word breathlessly twice within the same page also makes me want to shove a copy of ‘Anna Karenina’ down his throat. Seriously, dude. Did you even read your own novel? Did you at least spell check it before sending it off to the editor?

The ironic part in all of this is that I’ve actually read every book in this series so far. I think I keep at it for the same reason I watched the show ‘Lost’ for so long. I need to know what happens.

Let that be a lesson to you, aspiring writers. If you’re going to write a crappy book, at least let it end on a cliffhanger. Otherwise, you’re toast.